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Henry D. Thoreau - Walden

 ....draw lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man's particular behaviour and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height and depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how the shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side......

 Henry D. Thoreau - Walden

There is a bar across the entrance of our every cove …..each is our harbour for a season, in which we are detained or partially land locked....When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harboured becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh.
At the advent of each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harbourless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualise them.